When Governor Gooch returned to England, in 1749, he left the council in power, who divided (1751) the province into four military districts, and to the command of one of them they assigned a young man of nineteen, George Washington by name. Late in the same year (November 20, 1751) a notable character presented himself in Robert Dinwiddie, and the College of William and Mary welcomed the new executive with a formal address.[623] Dinwiddie had been unpopular as a surveyor of customs, as such officers almost invariably are; and he came to his new power in Virginia at a trying time, just as a great war was opening, and he and the burgesses could not escape conflict on the question of the money needed to make Virginia bear a creditable part in that war. When it was the northern frontiers towards Canada which were threatened, neither Maryland nor Virginia could be made to feel the mortification that their governors felt, if the northern colonies were left to fight alone the battles in which all the English of the continent were interested. [Illustration] But the struggle was now for the thither slope of the Alleghanies and the great water-shed of the Ohio. In this conflict Virginia presented a frontier to be ravaged, as she soon learned to her cost. The story of that misfortune is told in another chapter,[624] as well as of the outbreak which Dinwiddie forced, when he sent Washington to Le Bœuf. The exigencies of the conflict, however, were not enough to prevent the assembly from watching jealously every move of the governor for asking money from them; and he in turn did little to smooth the way for their peaceable acquiescence, when he exacted unusual fees for his own emolument. The aristocracy were still powerful, and, working upon the fears entertained by the masses that their liberties were in danger, all classes contrived to keep Dinwiddie in a pretty constant turmoil of mind, a strain that, though past sixty, he bore unflinchingly. If, by his presentation of the exigencies, he alarmed them, they would vote, somewhat scantily, the money which he asked for: but they embarrassed him by placing its expenditure in the hands of their own committee. Dinwiddie was often compelled to submit to their exasperating requirements, and was obliged to inform the Lords of Trade that there was no help for it. It was war indeed, but this chapter is concerned chiefly with civil affairs. Nothing, therefore, can be said here of the disaster of Braddock and its train of events down to the final capture of DuQuesne. Forts were built,[625] and the Indians were pursued[626], and Virginia incurred a debt during it all of £400,000, which she had to bear with the concomitants of heavy taxes and a depreciated paper money. At the end of the war, Norfolk, with its 7,000 inhabitants, was still the only considerable town.